Feature Articles

How gold rushes helped make the modern worldby Benjamin Wilson Mountford and Stephen Tuffnell

This year is the 170th anniversary of one of the most significant events in world history: the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California. On January 24, 1848, while inspecting a mill race for his employer John Sutter, James Marshall glimpsed something glimmering in the cold winter water. “Boys,” he announced, brandishing a nugget to his fellow workers, “I believe I have found a gold mine!”

A new book reveals how gold fever brought American warfare north of the borderby Greg Klein

Is this the price of gold—the murder of defenceless people followed by retaliatory beheadings as a private American army threatens genocidal war in the future Canada? There’s more to British Columbia’s first great gold rush than has been acknowledged and, 160 years after the fact, a newly published book casts harsh light on the Fraser River mania and its accompanying Fraser River War.

At first glance, the rare earths aspect of the U.S.-China tariffs tussle looks like small change—a proposed 10% duty on American RE imports that might cause a smallish markup on some manufactured goods and wouldn’t necessarily apply to defence uses. But all that’s part of a much bigger battle that will probably target $250 billion of Chinese exports to the U.S. China used an incomparably smaller incident in 2010 to rationalize a ruthless sequence of rare earths trade machinations. Could something like that happen again, this time with different results?

Miners have suddenly become “lean and mean” but not in a good way, according to Rick Rule. Twenty years of under-investment, an over-correction to a previous binge of M&A “insanity,” have left companies with declining resources. “This can’t continue,” the career contrarian contended. “Every day you mine, you shrink.” But the people who build and run mines prefer to outsource exploration. As a result, he says, “we are coming into the absolute heyday of prospect generators.”

It was a momentous week for Canadian regulators, seemingly. In a ruling on “one of the largest corporate frauds in Canadian history,” the Ontario Securities Commission slammed Sino-Forest scamsters with over $81 million in sanctions. One day later the Canadian Securities Administrators announced a nationwide total last year of nearly $70 million in penalties and a roughly equal amount in payback orders. All that sounds impressive, but a troubling question remains: How much—or, more accurately, how little—will ever be collected?

Transcending low grades in school, he hit high grades in mining and philanthropyby Greg Klein

Here’s a guy who got rejected not by “virtually every university in Canada, it was every university in Canada”—and for an MBA program at that. Now chairperson of Goldcorp TSX:G, Ian Telfer credits one school’s 11th-hour offer with giving him a second shot at his career, putting an undistinguished background behind him to become a serial success story. His reflections provided inspiration to a sold-out Vancouver audience of 850 people hoping to pick up some of the magic that made him a mining legend.

The Royal Canadian Mint breaks the numismatic mould to cast creative coinsby Greg Klein

Money’s appeal couldn’t be more obvious, yet coins specifically bring to mind values intrinsic, speculative or esthetic. By no means neglecting the first two, the Royal Canadian Mint has been emphasizing the third, and in ways increasingly innovative. Issuing over 200 such products each year, its “coins” have become more and more exotic. That shows in two recent releases, which can be said to source their materials from the end of the Earth and beyond.

There’s nothing like jumping into a river at the head of a waterfall—especially the Zambezi above the hundred-plus-metre drop of Victoria Falls while an airborne crew films the stunt for television—to grab people’s attention. That’s the sort of thing Iain Stewart has done, but as a means to an end. A geologist with a gift for communication, he evidently has a mission to express a sense of wonder in the science and its importance to people’s lives. But what about all those other geos lacking the resources of network TV or the advantages of charisma? Stewart discussed that in a June 18 public event at the first-ever Resources for Future Generations conference in Vancouver.

Evidently the organizers want to find common ground between disparate, even polarized, viewpoints. And Vancouver, as a world capital of mining, a burgeoning high-tech centre for clean energy and a hotbed of environmental activism, might be the ideal venue for such an endeavour. It’s here that Resources for Future Generations will assemble an international and divergent group to discuss three essentials to our survival on this planet: energy, minerals and water.

Solid state’s a contender, but lithium-ion has years of growth: Simon Mooresby Greg Klein

Lithium bulls faced a bearish backlash last February, when Morgan Stanley circulated a note predicting “2018 to be the last year of the global lithium market deficit, followed by significant surpluses emerging from 2019 onwards.” More pessimism rained on lithium from a report by Wood Mackenzie. Meanwhile some prognosticators talk up the solid state battery’s inevitability. Does all that indicate an end to the Li-ion battery’s quarter-century run?